Vilya's Workblog

A little over a week has passed since the new utility skills went live on our Frontline beta, and we've had some time to discuss your feedback and make plans for our next step(s).

While we were ready to rework any skill that people felt were too unbalanced or difficult/boring to use, it seems we won't have to: most of the skills have received positive feedback, and the main points of discussion have been whether some skills have been too OP or not: often with different people claiming the very same skills are either too OP or too underwhelming. Hopefully these issues will be solved through some proper balancing.

In regards to this, there's a number of changes we want to do to Barrier specifically. First of all, we'll change the color of the damage numbers that show up when the barrier is absorbing damage, as well as some kind of indicator for when the it's is about to run out of HP. Hits on the barrier will also count as damage taken in Arcade Mode, meaning it will lower your score. You also won't be able to resummon the barrier more than once per Arcade Room, since it's such a powerful spell for getting through the floors (albeit with a drastically lower score).

Now, as for what's coming next....

Instead of polishing these skills further and adding them to stable, we'll be finishing up a more or less complete rebalance of nearly all of the skills currently in the game. This will give our sound designer some time to crank out sound effects for the new ones, and makes for a bigger, more interesting stable update.

Some of the changes we are looking into here are:

* One handed weapons will do less damage. Right now they are a bit unbalanced compared to two handed weapons since you can hit way more often with 1H attacks.

* Cast Speed will increase the speed of skills, and not just the charge time. An example of this would be the insect swarm dealing it's damage faster (and by doing so, run out faster as well), the cloud summon hitting more often or your character finishing a blade flurry attack quicker. These will all be balanced properly, so that summons that block a portion of your EP won't be affected as much by cast speed as skills that need to be recast.

* We'll experiment with being able to freeze bosses: Fred will look into suitable visual effects for this, which has been our main concern, as we can't make individual freeze graphics that suits all bosses the same way we could with regular enemies. We'll also make a change so there's a bigger chance of freezing enemies that are chilled (slowed), or possibly that an enemy has to be chilled before it can be properly frozen.

* The magic weapon improvement mentioned previously: the addition of an orb that unleashes from magic weapons as you hit. The orb will trigger when you're too far away to reach an enemy with your attack, essentially increasing the range of all magic weapons. However, the orb in question will always do less damage than if your weapon hit the enemy directly, and the damage it makes will be based on your magic attack.

* New talents, at least 5 per talent tree, with a maximum of 10 extra per tree, in order to avoid players having to read through too many talent descriptions to find what they'd like to level. These will be discussed in a later meeting.

There will also be, as mentioned, slight edits of nearly every skill: but more on that at a later date!

In Fred's department, it's been all about getting the Focus animation up and running, and starting on what's a little sneak peek of what's to come: a new fireball animation for the upcoming skill rebalance!

First, let's take a look at the fireball:

You might wonder what this new animation has to do with skill rebalance. The thing is, we found that some of the skills were a little lacking in effects, which made them feel less epic or impactful than they actually are. This is by no means true of all skills: so don't worry, we won't spend too much time on remaking skill animations now! In fact, for the most part, it'll be minor adjustments to damage, speed or mechanics.

For the fireball, though, it being the very first skill that was created, it was time for a little upgrade. This goes to show how far we've come as graphic artists: the first one being made several years ago, one of the earliest props of the game, while the latter is Fred's latest version. It looks a lot better, right?

Next, the Focus animation! Since we wanted the player to be able to move around as they use this skill, we wanted the character to float in the air: both to make things easier for us, and since it just looks better when channeling the skill compared to trying to look zen while running around!

Below you can see it in action with the indicator/timer and the proper effects:

With Arcadia's rework, we want this Arcade Mode town to feel different from the rest of the world, so almost all graphics will be made more or less from scratch, rather than reusing old sprites. This means not only the buildings, but also the greenery needs to be remade.

Previously, we looked at making new paths and grass decorations (where we did reuse a few flowers: we've not yet decided if we want to remake those as well). Today, let's look at the trees and bushes!

..and in the desert portrait area, it's time for a portrait of a woman living in the village (they aren't all tourists or merchants!):

Finished version below:

In this next part of the Arcadia rework, we slow down a little and start looking at the details. There's some vital parts missing, such as the mountain which allows you to enter your arcade runs, as well as actual paths and greenery! Time for a fix:

After a couple more weeks of designing, implementing, polishing and remaking, we have finally patched the frontline beta to include the new set of Utility skills! With the addition of these skills, we expect the game change a lot for some players, if not all - we suspect a lot of you have longed for something to use spare silver points on, and many of the Utility skills offer new paths of gameplay. In short, we can't wait to see how you guys use them, and what the feedback will be.

While we hope it will be possible to balance all of this properly (we've done our best so far, but we're always ready for your feedback on what's broken and what may be too lame), we are aware that depending on your feedback, we might have to rethink certain things. For instance, if every single one of you hate a specific skill! Because of this, it's important to let us know what bothers you (and what you like!) so we know how to proceed. As always, feel free to share your opinions on this patch and the skills here or on the forums!

And as always, to see the full patch notes, go to this forum thread!

Since most of our thoughts and discussions have been shared already (Utility skills all the way) last week, I'll be talking a little bit about the future instead!

Teddy will focus this week on bug fixing (no surprises there)! There's already been a bunch of reported (and not reported) ones discovered, so that will likely keep him busy for a while, as well as any needed rebalance.

Fred will go back to touching up the desert enemies (specifically the Solem) and will then proceed to make graphics for all of those desert inhabitant portraits I've been working on. As soon as things calm down a bit with this new patch, we'll have a meeting where we discuss a bunch of fun upcoming things that will need a ton of animations, specifically another Marino battle and the enemies of the next dungeon!

Meanwhile, I'll return to focusing on the Arcadia Rework, which will be my main focus for a while to come now that (hopefully) everything needed for the Utility skills have been fixed! Stay tuned :)

In Fred's department, there's a lot of Utility skill stuff going on. First, the development of the blink:

With the intended patch date drawing ever closer, it's time to make a decision concerning the buffs and how many times it'll be possible to upgrade each skill.

The next step on our quest to implement the Utility skills is making the proper menu backgrounds for it! The old one is rather outdated, and in fact much older than the rest of the skill menu:

As we continue to test the Utility skills, we're now fairly sure these are the ones we want to use in the end, and so it's time for me to make a bunch of skill icons!

First up, the Focus skill (the very first frame of each WIP-animation shows our current placeholder icon made by Teddy, and the last frame is my reinterpretation):

Focus is the current name of the meditate skill which allows you to channel EP by holding the skill button, and allows you to cast a skill for free after a set amount of time. Since it's EP focused, we decided to use a purple background (as the EP meter is purple).

Next, the Barrier, which in our game kind of looks like a bubble engulfing the character, and so I wanted to focus on that in its skill icon:

For the blink skill, we had a bit of a hard time coming up with something that would resemble the skill at all, in such a limited amount of space. This might be the skill icon I'm the most unsure of, as it might look more like some kind of healing skill than a blink skill (though maybe that's just my associations due to the green - perhaps a simple color change might help in that regard):

Next, Death Mark, fittingly using a skull (I modified the one used in the animation where boss-Vilya yells out insults at her minions in the second battle), and added some decorations based off of a sword behind it. Red, as it's an offensive skill that will help you deal a lot more damage:

For the Stasis icon, I focused on the stasis effect, which grays out an enemy and disables them from combat. In this case I took a Rabby sprite, turned it black & white and painted some background patterns around it:

Finally, for challenge I brought out boss-Vilyas insults once more! As you yell at the enemy you're targeting, your own character will begin cursing at them in a similar way, so I thought it'd be nice to use the same graphic indicators for the insults:

And here's the lineup:

We haven't made the buff icons yet, as we're currently discussing whether we want only two or if it would be more fun to divide them after all. Since we haven't come to a decision yet, we'll refrain from making their skill icons until we do.

Last week was all about the Arcadia Rework for me, something which will continue to be the main focus for a long while to come. As you can tell, it's coming along at a steady pace, one building at a time!

This week I will begin creating the underlying decorations, grass and paths between the various spaces. Since we're also fairly sure about the Utility skills, I'll also start creating their icons, while Teddy and Fred continue to deal with testing, testing, testing and skill graphics!

We've had two major discussions these last few days, both in regards to the new Utility skills. First, about the buffs: we are currently disagreeing whether it's better to keep them as we originally planned (one buff for the offensive stats and one for the defensive stats), or to separate them further. Specifically, there's an idea it'd be more interesting the have speed be it's own buff, allowing the current Haste skill to remain (only balanced so it's more useful). However, there are those of us who feel the "package" buff is a more interesting buff to use, even if it means the speed stat won't be buffed as much as it could have been if it were its own buff.

Currently, we haven't actually made up our minds about this! What do you think you guys would prefer? Two buffs: one for offense (damage, speed, crit) and one for defense (defense, shield reg, EP reg), or three: one for damage and crit, one for speed, and the defense buff left as is?

We've also talked about the amount of silver points spent on each Utility skill. We're considering whether to have each skill have 5 levels (as was planned), or if it's better to cap them at 3 each.

With 5 stages, the skills become more of an efficient silver point sink, but the skill improvement between each level will be rather small. With 3, each point spent on the skill will give a bigger upgrade, but you'll also finish leveling the skills much sooner. Currently we're leaning towards 3, as it seems more rewarding to the player that way, but we haven't fully made up our minds yet.

If you have any ideas in regards to these discussion, feel free to share in the comments! We love to hear your input and what you think about decisions like these - after all, we want to do what's best for the players :)

In Fred and Teddy's department, things are progressing rather quickly: the graphics for the Utility skills are coming together one by one. Here's a few examples of the Barrier skill, starting with it's breaking due to a bee attack:

In the current iteration we've decided not to go with our original plan, which was that a barrier break like the one seen above would cause you to take the remaining damage (if any) after the last of your barrier hp is used up. Instead, it'll now absorb the whole attack, keeping you safe from harm even as it's close to breaking. Our reasoning for this is that it feels more satisfying being able to completely shield yourself from harm, especially against strong enemies which might be able to hit through the barrier with just one attack. We'll balance this by lowering the amount of hits and hp the barrier can shield you from instead, but if it still ends up too OP we might bring back our original plan.

Of course, after a barrier break you won't be able to recast the skill for a little while as well, as seen above.

Next, what it looks like as it expires due to the time limit:

As you can see, it does not last very long: part of the balancing. Finally, below, you can see the perfect guard effect as you bring it out in the right moment against a bee:

And here's a closer look at the effects:

We've also begun implementing the Death Mark graphics seen in last week's post! We are, however, considering changing it slightly, perhaps making the sword red and adding a skull, making it better fit its rather ominous name!

And to end this post, here's a first iteration of the Challenge skill:

This, too, will be further improved. Below you can see an effect that will be added to the animation, to better indicate in which direction you aim your skill. Eventually there will be a speech bubble with curses thrown at the enemy as well:

Arcadia continues to grow, and now it's time to add that central piece of decoration, right below the mountain where you set your course for another arcade run!

In the portrait department, it's time for another kid roaming the streets of the desert/harbor town:

I have all kinds of ideas for this NPC, though I'm not entirely sure they will actually be realized, so I'll keep quiet about them for now. All I can say is that Heero Yuy of Gundam Wing might have been an inspiration!

Last week we left Remedi with his wagon surroundings looking rather empty! Time to remedy (ha) that, and give him some fancy flowers for his collection:

It's another Monday, and work on the Utility skills is in full progress!

Right now, that mainly consists of testing all the billion ways each spell can break the game (which they do, a lot), by playing through the entire thing using each spell on every enemy in every possible way. While we won't be able to find all of the bugs or problems this way, hopefully it'll make them more or less fully functional before we hand it over to you guys in the Frontline beta! Multiplayer will need a whole lot of testing of its own, both to make sure the effects are syncing up between users, and to bug test the friendly targeting (as some of the Utility skills will be used as buffs which can be cast on anyone in your party).

At some point I will be called upon to make the proper skill icons for each of these, though I'm not sure if that will happen this week or later when we're 500% sure these are the skills we'll actually end up using (that is, once we're certain none of them feel too boring as we try them out properly on our bug testing runs). Until then my art focus will be mainly on continuing the Arcadia Rework, as it's what's next on our to-do once the skills have been finished (and the occasional desert town portrait). Slow but steady!

Fred, meanwhile will be focusing this week on creating more of the Utility skill animations and Teddy will be put on major polish and bug hunting duty. At the moment, we don't have an ETA for when the skills will be available on Frontline: it's all very dependent on how broken they end up being on these playthroughs.

We've already had lots of talks about small edits we'd like to see on each of the abilities, so they're not even in their finished form as it is right now! No major changes in terms of mechanics, but lots of tiny timing-things and such. For example, whether Death Mark should trigger automatically once the meter is full, or if it should still wait for the timer to run out. In this case we decided to keep the timer fairly short, and have it wait for it to run out before it triggers, even if you've done enough damage to fill the whole thing. Our reasoning for this is to make sure you can't spam it too often, in multiplayer, for instance - as you'd be able to fill the meter a lot faster with four people who might all also have the ability (though we'll try to balance this as well). Our goal is to make it fairly hard filling up the meter before the timer runs out, so it'll be a bit of a fun challenge to try and fill it as much as you can when battling.

Hope you guys are enjoying your summer!

Since the Utility skills will be implemented much sooner than the desert enemies, Fred has paused the creation of those beast and began work on the spell effects needed!

Prototyping the skills is quite fast work, (as always it's the last 5% - the polish - that take 95% of the time). Today, we'll look at the next set of utility skills, those categorized as offense!

First, the Death Mark! This skill has a new targeting system, which can be seen above. It basically aims at whatever enemy is the closest to your target, which you can move around the screen so long as you hold down the spell button.

Everything you see here is prototype graphics, so it will likely look a lot different in the end, but the general gist of it is that as you do damage to a target with Death Mark, a meter of some sort (in this case it will probably be a sword) will start to fill up. Once a set amount of time has passed, the mark will trigger and deal bonus damage based on how much you've already damaged the target. The more you've filled the meter, the more damage it will do when it trigger - so you better try to get as much damage as possible on your target before that happens, to maximize the bonus damage. If the damage Death Mark will do is enough to kill the target, it will automatically trigger and execute the enemy for you before the timer runs out.

Taunt/Challenge lacks all of the relevant graphics, but works much as described earlier: you challenge an enemy by shouting some insults at it, causing the both of you to deal more damage against each other. Upon leveling the skill, you'll be able to target more enemies:

Sleep, or rather, Stasis is the skill we've come the furthest with graphics wise. The mechanics are fairly straight forward and as described previously: the targeted enemy gets put in a stasis from which it's released either when a new enemy gets put into stasis or when you hit it.

Here's the first prototype version, simply freezing the enemy in place:

In the second iteration, a flashing light was added to indicate when an enemy is about to come out of stasis:

Finally, some visual effects were added, and as it is, we're already pretty satisfied with the way it looks right now - we might just add some small effect for when an enemy gets hit by the spell and otherwise keep it the way it is:

Another desert character! This time a young boy, roaming the streets - wonder what he might be up to :)

As Teddy continues to prototype, I thought it would be fun to take a look at these very early stages of each of the skills! First up, we have the Defensive utility skills, three skills that are bound to change the game play slightly for at least some of you:

First up, we have the blink (as seen above). As mentioned in the earlier rundown of the utility skills, it auto-targets some distance away as you tap the button, but you can also move the target around (if you have the time).

It'll have a base cost of some energy, with a 20 more energy increase each time you spam it. If you stop using it for about 3 seconds currently, it will reset to the base cost. These costs will be lowered slightly for each silver point you spend on the skill, culminating in being able to use the first blink for free. The exact numbers are subject to change with further testing.

Next, the shield/barrier! It has an amount of HP, much like your physical shield, based on a percentage of your own HP, which increased per level spent on the skill. It can take damage up to his amount, but will always break after 4 hits regardless of how much damage they do to your shield. If your barrier gets crushed, you'll take the remaining damage from the attack (the amount it failed to shield you from) as regular damage.

Finally, the meditation/focus skill. It regenerates your EP faster the more you've leveled it, and if you channel it for two seconds the next skill you use will be cast free of EP cost. The circle underneath the character indicates when that happens!

We'll now test these a bit more in-house before deciding on any changes, or whether Fred should start working on making the proper animations straight away!

And another week goes by! Last week we finalized Housing and finally managed to get a Stable patch up and running with the whole thing, meaning that (unless there are many more bugs that need fixing), it's time to focus our attention on those Utility skills! If you are one of those waiting for Stable updates, please go ahead and try housing out, and let us know about how to make it better in the future or any bugs you might find! The full patch notes can be viewed here!

I know a lot of you are sad to hear about there still not being a healing skill, but hopefully the inclusion of the barrier skill will soothe that blow slightly, while still keeping true to our design. So far, we're all happy about the skill ideas and hope you will be too!

Teddy is currently prototyping the Utility skills using whiteboxing methods (meaning he's winging the art with what we already have or extremely simple paint art), just to get a feel of how they'll work in the actual game. Sometimes it becomes very clear even at this stage that some things just don't work the way we'd like it to, and if that happens it's unnecessary to have Fred make complex animations for skills that will get cut!

So in the meanwhile, Fred's continuing to work on the desert enemies until we're satisfied with the first bunch of skill prototypes, and I'll continue to focus on the Arcadia Rework, which is likely to be the next step after the Utility skills have been implemented and the skills and battle systems have received an overall rebalance. I'm also continuing to create portraits every now and then, for the inhabitants of the upcoming desert/harbor town, to avoid spending multiple weeks doing nothing but portraits once we get there! Stay tuned :)

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